After TA’ing CS 180 in my Fall semester, I looked to take on a bigger challenge. Having found one in CS 240, where I learned C in a few months, I decided to TA the course in Spring semester of 2020.

My roles included proctoring exams, lab sessions, and answering student questions on Piazza.

I’ve already talked about what TA’ing two classes was like in my past two posts. But this experience was unique. I wasn’t an expert in C. But I was confident in my debugging ability.

Students would approach me confusion about their code. Having familiarized myself with the assignment, all I had to do was get an understanding of their code. I walked the students through my debugging process - GDB and printing.

COVID 19 Strikes

In mid march, the COVID-19 Pandemic struck, and we were all sent home. Classes transitioned to remote learning, as did labs. I had to learn to become a virtual TA quickly.

Helping a student virtually was definitely much more of a challenge. To start, reading through their code on a shared screen was more difficult than scrolling at my own pace. Albeit, I wouldn’t type on their keyboards in-person, but pointing out specific lines and character positions turned out to be difficult without my index finger.

Yet I held true to my initial promise. No matter the question that a student had for me, I always made sure to help them out fully, instead of turning them to a GTA or another UTA. At the cost of this, I would spend much 1:1 time with students, and could not address as many students as I would in-person. This is a skill that I will continue to hone.

Testimonials

No testimonials for this one unfortunately. Due to remote learning, it doesn’t seem that there was a TA feedback form passed around.